I think Widmyer was the best passing threat that I can remember. Having said that the style of play was much different back then. Widmyer had talent around him, but not the talent Goodson does. Widmyer in this current offense would be absolutely sick.

(Note: I'm a big Widmyer fan, I think he's the best QB we've had since I started paying attention to Wofford football in 2003; we've had lots of good ones though.)

I agree on Widmyer but here is the counterpoint: in 2008, Widmyer had Strickland, Joslin, Bersin at WR, Fenn allen at TE, Romero, Rucker and EB in the backfield. That’s 2 guys who caught/catch balls in the NFL plus 2 HOF’ers (including perhaps the best player we have ever had) plus an All SoCon TE.We are talented now but not that talented.BGood is a terrific passer and he has lots of talent around him. Morgan IMO is the Best receiving RB we have ever had. He and McAfee are outstanding HBs. Vastly underrated.

See your point, Ruck. I had little recollection of those personnel, largely because IMO our passing game at its best this year is more versatile and dangerous than it was then, when it did not factor as heavily as it should have. I liked Widmeyer but have come to like Goodson more. As I recall Widmeyer started only one year for us. Going way back, Chandler was as good a passer out of the wishbone as we ever had.

Our passing game now is better and more versatile for sure. Back then we had just started experimenting with the 2 back gun stuff. But we had a lot more home run balls which seems to be a rarity these days.BTW - I think FU is way ahead of us in incorporating a passing game into the 3 back option offense. I am very impressed with their schemes. Doesn’t hurt to have a really good QB and receivers too.

Have we ever had a QB who could throw with accuracy off the run like Goodson? He has proven over and over that he can be VERY accurate while running, which is the real definition of using every facet of the TO. I would think that 45 second possession at the end of the first half would scare the Bojangles out of anyone scouting us. We pound it and pound it and have our opponent thinking we are virtually a one deminsional team and then all of the sudden we complete five straight passes after taking over with 1:30 left in the half and score with :45 left. Wow, that is impressive. It makes you realize what we may have been able to do if we opened up our full arsnel a little more often. IMO the only thing that prevented us from scoring a lot more this year was our own OC. The writers and fans may think we are a boring TO team that pounds out 300 yards per game on the ground; but the opposing coaching staff had to look at that drive and cringe.

I think some of the new things we saw this past Saturday will help us this coming weekend. It is helpful that NDSU's coaches will be spending time thinking about fake field goals, Air Terrier, hurry up drives and the designed QB draw that we showed.

As for Furman's playbook, I agree that we should mimic some of it. The mass personnel shifts and misdirection stuff was nice and would incorporate well for us. If you watch the play that Lemon decimated the back on the corner you will notice a guy streaking in between the QB and RB prior to the pitch which could have been a devestating, fast developing reverse if they'd chosen to pitch it.

youngterrier wrote:I think there's a good chance we could see Newman in this game.

I agree. I'm not an expert, but I doubt there are many in the MVFC outside of DB's and WR's with his kind of speed and shake. It will probably be mostly Goodson, but some change of pace could yield the sort of quick hits that Newman put on El Cid in the 2nd Round and Youngstown in the Quarterfinals. I think they could struggle with Blake Morgan as well.

Anyone know when our team and contingent leaves for Fargo?In an article in our local paper there was a story referencing a new football indoor practice facility being built at Wake Forest and one of the features is an audio system capable of generating crowd noises of any level. That evidently is already inexistence in a number of major schools. It would be great to be able to use a facility like that prior to a game in a barn. We wouldn't need to build it, just borrow it or rent it for about two hours.

Here's part of the reason I'm cautiously optimistic about this one from an offensive perspective. I did some number crunching comparing the 2012 and 2017 statistics because it's indicative of our tendencies and strengths. I posted this on AGS, but it deserves a hearing here:

It's an understatement how much EB carried us in 2012. Of the 4546 rush yards we had, EB had 2035, of 766 carries, he had 290. One player had 45% of our production on the ground and 37% of the carries. He had a bigger proportion of our offense when you factor in the fact that that we only had about 663 yards passing that year (153 against a D2 opponent). Eric Breitenstein was quite literally 40% of our offense. A solid 1/3 of the plays we had entailed him touching the ball. That was unsustainable, but I digress.

Compare that with this year. We don't have as much yardage rushing. Going into this one, we have about 3048 yards on the ground, but we have twice the passing yards (1294). It worth noting that Wofford had a weirdly efficient time passing the ball going 6/7 for 64 yards in 2012 against NDSU. So we're passing the ball twice as well as we did back then. We averaged about 7 pass attempts per game in 2012 (wow), but now that number is 12.

When it comes to carries, Andre Stoddard has about 27% of the carries with 170, accounting for about 25% of the production with over 800 yards. The following 4 rushers differ from 11% of the carries to 15%. The second and third rushers have similar production. Our top 2nd and 3rd rushers account for about 44% of the production, while in 2012 it was about 19%.

If you're going to break this down into position, in 2012 the starting fullback accounted for 45% of our substantive production (Donovan Johnson was a hybrid player between FB/HB but for the purposes of this post I'm counting him as a HB). By substantive production I mean "not in garbage time," which I'm defining by eyeballing and using memory to determine whether a player actually saw PT. Running backs accounted for about 30% and QBs at about 15%. It would note, the number with HBs is probably inflated because Donovan Johnson played both HB and FB.

In 2017, fullbacks have accounted for about 38%. Halfbacks have accounted for about 44%. QBs, about 15%. If you take the lead rusher out #2-6 have about 2,127 yards rushing in 2017. In 2012, that number was 1535 (note: we've played one less game than that year; we also played a division 2 team and whalloped them 82-0 that year).

Really, if you take out the D2 game and the NDSU game, our offense is only averaging about 30-50 ypg less than we did back then, but the kicker is that we were much more dependent on Eric Breitenstein and the fullback than now. There were lots of games that year where we threw for less than 40 yards. Outside of one outlier game, UTC, we've pretty much out-passed every game, sans the D2 game in 2012.

So I think we're a lot more balanced, and with respect to the 2012 team, I think we're better this year, even though the 2012 team didn't squeak by as many people. We're just more balanced on offense.